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With science if at first you don’t succeed, keep trying

The discovery of gravitational waves and string theory’s long search for vindication illustrate a truism: to be right in science, first prepare to be wrong

Jason Raish

PLEASURE is not the least of reasons for doing science. As the 19th-century French physiologist Claude Bernard put it, “the joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest the mind of man can ever feel.”

Then again, Bernard also said, “those who do not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discovery”. Few who have spent much time in the lab or sharpening their theorists’ pencils would question the part torment plays in the process – not least the nagging fear that your ideas might prove irrefutably wrong.

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That makes the moments of discovery all the sweeter. Before September last year no one had seen a gravitational wave, despite decades of work. The efforts of thousands of physicists mean we have them in the bag – vindicating Einstein’s idea after a century of waiting not to be wrong.

What might be next? Eyes are turning once again to the Large Hadron Collider, which switched on at close to its full design energy for the first time last year, and will start smashing particles for a new season in April. No one knows what might emerge from the debris, or what might already lurk in what we already have. A recent anomaly in LHC data from last year has prompted much excited speculation and a storm of papers from theorists vying to explain it.

“This is the deal: we catch a glimpse of the unseen and let our imaginations run amok in response“

Some deride this as “ambulance chasing” – an undisciplined, anything goes, pin the tail on the donkey form of creating hypotheses. Not all those papers can possibly be right, but if in the torment of hundreds there is joy for one, there is joy for us all. This is the deal we have struck with nature: we perform experiments, occasionally catch a glimpse of something never seen before, and let our imaginations run amok in response.

It is perhaps only natural to raise questions when theorists’ imaginative feats cannot readily be put to the test. String theorists, for example, play with algebra, complex geometries and knot theory, all the while hunting for results that might play into our understanding of the universe’s structure. But we cannot yet conceive experiments at the energy scales that would be required to verify the theory.

That has sparked a lively discussion about what other sources of legitimacy besides experimental test might exist for theories that purport to be scientific (see “Beyond experiment: Why the scientific method may be old hat“). Certainly if experimental support is not yet forthcoming, that doesn’t mean it will forever elude us. Few had any notion how to test for gravitational waves when Einstein proposed them in 1918.

And even if experiments seem to come up with the goods to support our hypotheses about how the world hangs together, it doesn’t end there: human intuitions of cause and effect prove all too often flawed (see “A new kind of logic: How to upgrade the way we think“). Intuition was one reason, for example, that the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics was prematurely thrown on to the scrapheap. It has now been rescued, thanks to a new lab experiment that overturns an intuition-based thought experiment dreamed up a quarter of a century ago (see “Quantum weirdness may hide an orderly reality after all“). While the de Broglie-Bohm idea has not been proved right, it is certainly no longer wrong.

Not everything or everyone can be right. But perhaps the most valuable weapon science has is its ability to be wrong – and with time and patience do better. Progress might be slow, and it might not happen in the way we like. But the eventual joy is worth any amount of torment.

This article appeared in print under the headline “If at first you don’t succeed…”